More Examples of Authors Behaving Badly

A while back, I wrote on Chuck Wendig and his response to readers who disliked his Star Wars book Aftermath. I was sympathetic to some of Wendig's responses, but was critical of the way he blamed most of the negative attention on homophobia, when the evidence suggested that most unhappy readers were complaining about his writing style.

More recently I was struck by this tweet from SFF author Mary Robinette Kowal (MRW):

I see reviews complaining that Jane and Vincent's marriage is too perfect & unrealistic... It's based on my marriage. Sorry for your life.

— Mary Robinette Kowal (@MaryRobinette) September 16, 2015

This is not especially bad as far as responses to reviews go; but I think MRW would have been better advised not to respond in this manner.

Following on from these examples from SFF, I was inspired to do a little bit of digging into other instances in which authors have behaved badly. Of course, there is a long history of writers confronting (sometimes physically) their critics. And authors of course get involved with spats with other authors. When the critics are professionals, this can be an amusing spectator sport. But when the critics are regular readers commenting on their own blogs, Goodreads or Amazon, attacking them is a step too far. 

What follows is a partial (but growing) list focusing of examples of authors behaving badly. Mostly it collects the irregular behavior of famous people, but sometimes also the (in)famous behavior of (ir)regular people.

The first few entries are examples of authors attacking critics who were regular readers:

1. Kathleen Hale. Confessed to stalking a negative reviewer in The Guardian 'Am I being catfished?' An author confronts her number one online critic.
2. Richard Brittain. Travelled from London to Edinburgh to the place of work of a reviewer and then beat her over the head with a bottle of wine. 
3. Dylan Saccoccio. Went ballistic over a one-star review on Goodreads.
4. Candace Sams. When an Amazon reviewer left her latest novel one star, Sams posed as another reviewer, accused her detractor of being a “frustrated romance novelist” who “could not get his/her work published,” called them a coward, left roughly 400 angry posts, and threatened to call the FBI because the bad review amounted to “cyber stalking.”
5. Emily Giffin. When a long-term Giffin fan left a disappointed review on Amazon (that also praised Giffin’s earlier works) Giffin called up legions of fans to tear all negative Amazon reviewers to shreds resulting in over 100 nasty messages all telling her what a moron she was.
6. Jacqueline Howett. An amateur review of Howett’s book The Greek Seaman found numerous issues with Howett’s spelling, grammar, and sentence construction, concluding a two stars review by saying “reading shouldn’t be that hard.” Howett took to the comments section of the blog and began copying and pasting positive reviews from Amazon. She also attacked the blogger, claimed he’d downloaded the “wrong” copy and telling him to “f—k off.” In response, the blogger quoted some of her bad writing back at her then left the thread for good. Howett stayed and participated in a 400+ comment flame war with the rest of the Internet.

And now for attacks upon professionals (for amusement value):

1. Richard Ford.
1. Spat on Colson Whitehead at a party. Whitehead responded:

   “I would like to warn the many other people who panned the book that they might want to get a rain poncho, in case of inclement Ford.”

2. Shot a bullet through a book by Alice Hoffman and sent it---bullet and all---to Alice Hoffman after a bad review.
2. Norman Mailer.
1. Head-butted Gore Vidal in The Dick Cavett Show greenroom.
2. Punched Gore Vidal at a party; Vidal responded: “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.”
3. Stabbed his wife, Adele Morales Mailer, twice. He then told a friend who was trying to help her to "Get away from her. Let the bitch die.”
4. Called NYT critic Michiko Kakutani a "one-woman kamikaze" after a negative review. 
5. Said of Jack Kerouac, “His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop”.
3. Robert Frost. Set a fire at an Archibald MacLeish poetry reading.
4. Lillian Hellman. After Mary McCarthy said, on the Dick Cavett show, that, "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the,'" Hellman sued everyone involved for over $2 million. After McCarthy died before going to trial, Hellman wrote: “I was disappointed when she died. I wanted it to go to trial.”
5. Ernest Hemingway. Fought with just about everyone.
1. Once punched Orson Welles.
2. On Faulkner: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
6. Tolstoy. Challenged Turgenev to a duel.
7. Gustave Flaubert. Called George Sand “A great cow full of ink.”
8. H. G. Wells. Called George Bernard Shaw “An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
9. Anne Rice.
1. After readers criticized her novel Memnoch the Devil, she opened her novel Blood Canticle by having the main character insult readers for being too stupid to understand it.
2. After Blood Canticle received some awful reviews, Rice posted a 1,200-word diatribe to Amazon in which she called readers “arrogant and stupid.” She also targeted specific reviewers who had made such awful statements as “Anne, you really should have an editor.”
10. Alice Hoffman. When professional critic Roberta Silman gave her a merely okay review, she took to Twitter to vent her anger, sending 27 tweets calling Silman a moron before posting Silman’s private phone number and email online and asking fans to contact her (she got the number wrong).
11. Ayelet Waldman. Despite her novel Love and Treasure getting a great review from the New York Times, it was left off their “100 Notable Books of 2014” list. In a series of tweets, Waldman claimed “Love and Treasure is a f—king great novel,” claimed she’d spent the whole morning sobbing on the couch, and then went on to trash-talk the quality of other books on the list (see also Jenny Trout's take).
12. Robert Louis Stevenson. Described Walt Whitman as “like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”
13. Friedrich Nietzsche. Called Dante Alighieri “A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs”.
14. Wyndham Lewis. Said “Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.”
15. Gore Vidal. (from a longer list)
1. Of literary critic John Simon: “English is his third language and some of us were thinking about getting up a fund and sending him back to Berlitz for the remainder of the English language course.”
2. John Updike: “I can't stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I'm supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him. I'm more popular than he is, and I don't take him very seriously... Oh, he comes on like the worker's son, like a modern-day DH Lawrence, but he's just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top if he can do it."
3. Truman Capote: "Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house." Once called Capote “a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.” He called Capote's death "a good career move" and added "Every generation gets the Tiny Tim it deserves."
16. Mark Twain. On Jane Austen: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
17. George Bernard Shaw. “With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare,” he said. “The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him”.
18. Voltaire. Called Shakespeare a “drunken savage” whose works were a “vast dunghill.”
19. Henry James. Said of Henry David Thoreau, “he was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial – he was parochial”.
20. Gertrude Stein. Ezra Pound was nothing but “a village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
21. Virginia Woolf. Called James Joyce’s Ulysses: “an illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating”.
22. TS Eliot.  Declared that Aldous “Huxley, who is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one, has a certain natural – but little developed – aptitude for seriousness. Unfortunately, this aptitude is hampered by a talent for the rapid assimilation of all that isn’t essential”.
23. Byron. “Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry”.
24. Evelyn Waugh. Of Marcel Proust, “Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective”.
25. Truman Capote.
1. “I knew William Faulkner well. He was a great friend of mine,” he said. “Well, as much as you could be a friend of his, unless you were a fourteen-year-old nymphet”.
2. Of Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
26. William Faulkner. Of Ernest Hemingway, said: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
27. DH Lawrence. Of James Joyce? “Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”
28. Oscar Wilde. “There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope”.
29. Edith Sitwell. “Virginia Woolf’s writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere”
30. VS Naipaul.
1. Said that he doesn't consider any female writer his literary equal. Also said that women just have too much "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world." He also said, "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."
2. Gave away a copy of a Paul Theroux novel lovingly inscribed to him by the author, resulting in an ended friendship and a 15 year feud.
31. James Joyce. When poet William Butler Yeats asked Joyce if he'd be interested in having him look at some of Joyce's poetry, Joyce said, "I do so since you ask me, but I attach no more importance to your opinion than to anybody one meets on the street." Later in the conversation, Joyce said, "We have met too late. You are too old for me to have any effect on you."
32. JK Rowling. Along with Warner Bros., filed a lawsuit against a small publishing house that was publishing a school librarian's encyclopedia of Harry Potter lexicon. That is her right. But then in the lawsuit, she said that she had stopped work on a new novel because the suit "decimated [her] creative work." "I really don't want to cry," she stated during the trial. She called the encyclopedia "an act of betrayal."

Other lists of authors behaving badly (and that I consulted) are presented by:

1. Michelle Dean Author Stalks Blogger, Joins Long Tradition of Terrible Author Behavior, Gawker, October 21st , 2014.
2. Jennifer Schuessler In Book Circles, a Taming of the Feud, New York Times, June 4th, 2011.
3. 14 Authors Behaving Badly, Huffington Post, September 5th, 2013.